


Non-zero-sum

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: FlashForward
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Drama, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way Janis sees it, someone wins and someone loses. Time runs out and she's the one losing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non-zero-sum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ishyko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ishyko/gifts).



> My first foray into writing FlashForward fanfiction. It was nerve-wracking and so much fun to write once I got into a groove. There has been some agonizing over it, but in the end I'm happy with it.

_"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."_ \--D.H. Lawrence, _Lady Chatterley's Lover_

*

Thirty-seven past ten. The clock ticked another second past, another ten seconds, and suddenly it was too much. Janis set down her pen with more patience than she actually felt and rubbed her eyes, pushing her glasses out of the way. The clock was an unexpected, unwanted distraction from the stacks of paperwork waiting for her review before they'd ever make it to Wedeck's desk. Without Mark around, there was suddenly so much more paperwork to be done, even though she was sure Mark rarely ever actually kept up with his own paperwork. This wasn't the first long night she'd pulled. One of the drawbacks of being a salaried employee was that she never got overtime and was never paid more for the extra time she spent hunched over a desk, signing away hours of her life along with the work that no one ever wanted to do.

Four years of college, another two after that for a Masters, followed by five and a half months in Quantico, and all Janis felt like was a tired, cranky secretary instead of a proper agent.

It wasn't actually the clock that bothered her so much. The constant ticking was something she always automatically tuned out. If it had been so much of a bother, she could have just turned on the radio—anything to tune out the paced click of every second that passed. Janis knew herself well enough to know that she only ever got so irritated over the little things, the inconsequential things that came with life in the so-called real world and having a real job and a real career, when something bigger was wrong. The ticking clock was a symptom, not the problem, and it didn't take any real soul-searching to figure it out.

Thirty-eight and a half past ten. She groaned quietly and tried not to think about it. Every tick of the clock was another second off a countdown that was blinking in her head, one that she'd tried to ignore since September, when it had become a permanent fixture in everyone's minds. Everyone was living for April 29th. It had been all anyone would talk about, all anyone _wanted_ to talk about. People killed themselves for seeing something undesirable or nothing at all, while others were scrambling to avoid a future they barely believed could be changed at all. Some people were just casually waiting for it to happen to them.

Janis knew that she belonged to the latter. She also knew that it had probably cost her as much as it had given her.

The heels of her hands were still pressed hard against her eyes (before she joined the FBI, even all those long nights studying in grad school, she'd never felt the physical kind of ache in her eyes that warned of overwork and bone-deep exhaustion) when the sharp rap of someone's knuckles on the ledge above made her jump. It took a few seconds for her mind to catch up to her eyes and connect the shave-and-a-haircut knock and rumpled dove gray suit to _Demetri_, and then another second to remember his name at all.

"Jesus, Dem," she groaned, fixing her glasses from when she'd knocked them askew. "You scared the hell out of me."

He offered a grin to her and a short pang shot through her heart remembering when Demetri's smiles had been easy-going, carefree and bright. His mood swings had become volatile, nearly as bad as Mark's, and his smiles had seemed wry and increasingly dark since the blackout. This one was as close to the old Demetri as they came, worn at the edges and his eyes darkened by lack of sleep rather than the crushing weight of waiting for something he wasn't sure he could stop.

"It's New Years, Janis. What the hell are you doing here?" He leaned forward on the ledge and she rolled her eyes at him, pretending the countdown in her head wasn't there, flashing a sequence of numbers that could be hazy and unclear as long as she buried herself in other things.

"Catching up on your paperwork from Hong Kong," she told him in a deadpan, thrusting a few papers up at his nose and smiling when he actually took a double-take at them before grabbing them and dropping them back on her desk.

"You've been here since seven-thirty this morning. Wedeck will understand if you take advantage of the long weekend. You've been working your ass off."

"Not that you've been helping or anything." Janis considered the option, the promise of a long weekend off work, alone at home with nothing but inexplicable heartbreak, and groaned at the idea. "Thanks, Dem, I think I'd rather work through the weekend. Besides, shouldn't you be with Zoey tonight—and all weekend, for that matter?"

She caught the awkward shuffle before Demetri lowered his head and cleared his throat.

"Well—"  
"Don't tell me you—"

He looked back up at that and shook his head, tucking a hand into his pocket and shoving the other roughly through his hair until it rested on the back of his neck. "Oh, no, she's just out of town again. Until tomorrow, actually. We were planning on doing the whole 'make-love-in-the-new-year' thing when she got back."

"_Didn't_ actually need to know that, thanks," she laughed, folding her glasses and putting them away, as if she'd already agreed to leave. Janis didn't feel much like actually talking about Demetri's sex life, not when it was liable to lead them toward her lack thereof. "I'm glad you and Zoey are handling this."

He looked a little pained and Janis met his eyes with an apology already on her lips, but he shrugged and shook his head.

"Come on. There's that shitty diner down the street. Let me at least buy you a cup of coffee to make up for all of Mark's paperwork." Demetri's tone was light, but in the years since meeting him at Quantico, Janis knew that he wasn't leaving much room for discussion. He'd been a mess before Zoey, everything but his career disorganized, and then she'd come along and changed everything about him. Janis didn't miss that old Demetri, the one that kept trying to beat her in Quarters, but she did miss the one that was becoming a more complete man with every passing day rather than deteriorating in terror of the future.

"It's been a long time since you've offered me burned coffee and some banter in a cheap diner, Dem." She grinned, letting the awkward moment pass forgotten, and stood up. Demetri tapped twice on the ledge and stepped back, waiting for her to fall into step beside him while.

"It's as good a way to ring in the New Year as anything," he laughed, and both of his hands rested in his pockets when they stepped out into the cool night. "Why don't you have anything better than stale coffee and shit company for New Year?"

She shrugged. "I was never much of a party girl. Besides, living in the office since September does wonders for your social life."

Demetri hummed quietly, peering up at the light-scorched night sky like he might find a star to follow if he looked hard enough. "When was the last time you got laid, Janis?"

For a few seconds, Janis actually gaped at him before tugging the door to the diner open and holding it for him with a half-lifted eyebrow. "I'm still not going to let you watch."

"That isn't answering the question, you know."  
"Not since when you were in Washington." She pulled off her coat and flashed a smile to the waitress standing on the other side of the bar when she hung it on the coat rack.

Demetri followed her to a booth in the far corner and sat down without another word, except to order coffee for both of them when the waitress stopped by their table. It wasn't until she poured the coffee and dumped a handful of creamers on the table that he finally took the telltale breath that indicated that he was about to speak again.

Janis cut him off, holding up a hand. "If we're still going to talk about my sex life, I'd rather not." She didn't mention that it only hurt because it was one more reminder that she was out of time and out of options, but Demetri pressed anyway and she knew that was what he was getting to all along.

"I was talking about your flashforward," he told her quietly, stirring in a few creamers. They'd had a few conversations about the personal aspects of the blackout since it happened, but Demetri just seemed like he was sick of the whole thing. Maybe he was—_probably_ he was. Janis was sick of them too; sick of Mark's fatalistic talk, of everyone's panic, of everyone just thinking about April 29th instead of their everyday lives.

"I miss when we got to live our lives one day at a time," she burst out instead of answering the implicit question. She knew exactly what he meant and she just looked down at the coffee, pretending her heart wasn't thumping painfully behind her ribcage, too close to the hollow of her nearly barren womb.

He didn't say anything to that, but he did lift his mug in agreement and take a drink, closing his eyes and cringing at the acrid taste of the coffee that even creamer couldn't mask. "Fuck, this is really shitty coffee."

"Sugar helps," she offered, flicking a few packets at him.

"I know what you mean," he finally told her, when five packets of sugar were stirred into his cup. Demetri didn't do anything by fractions. He was just in or out, nothing more or less, and it was something Janis had both loved and hated about him. It made him a great friend and a shitty agent to cover for. Not knowing whether he was going to live or die, that had to be the worst kind of indecisiveness for someone who never looked before leaping if it meant having to stay in some neutral limbo for too long.

"Do you ever feel like there's a—"  
"Countdown? Yeah. Every fucking second."  
"I think everyone feels like that."  
"They're not all living like they're dying, though."

Janis sighed and bumped her head against the cheap divider between the booths. "Ever since the blackout, it's been like a biological clock I didn't even know I had has been going off. I never thought about it. I was one of those girls that cringed at the idea of heteronormative gender roles, white picket fences and a husband and two and a half kids, you know? I wanted to take down a Columbian drug dealer and shoot the bad guys and maybe save a few damsels in distress along the—oh, shut up, Demetri," she added when he laughed, his eyes wrinkling as the sound bubbled up from his chest.

"No, I think the idea of you saving some damsels in distress is pretty charming, really." He was still laughing, and then only started again with a snort when he tried to take a dignified drink of coffee.

"What I mean is that I never even thought about having kids until my flashforward, and the idea just kind of grew on me. I realized I was looking forward to it, picking out nursery sets for a little girl I wasn't even sure how I was going to conceive." She slumped onto her elbows and shrugged. "It was a little naïve, I guess, to just wait for it to happen like I was going to be the next Virgin Mary. I can't really say God is going to be too keen on sending the next coming of Christ to some lesbian who hasn't believed since she lost her virginity to the prom queen in a Catholic high school bathroom."

Demetri opened his mouth and Janis already had her face in her hands before the question came out.

"You lost your virginity to the prom queen?"  
"Doesn't matter, does it?"

"No, but shit, of all the things—" Demetri shook his head like he was shaking off a fly and then actually met her eyes. "You sound like you've given up on it."

That was the problem, Janis thought. She hadn't given up on it, even when it was so ludicrous that of course she should have. After the referral from Doctor Varley, she'd gone to the clinic, talked to the woman and gotten so far as her medical history before she had needed to come clean about the operation that had saved her life only a few short months before.

_You need to let your body heal, Miss Hawk,_ the doctor had told her gently and of _course_ that was the answer, only marginally better than telling her that it was a fool's errand, whether it had been two months or two years since the operation.

Instead, Janis swallowed the rest of her coffee, just as the waitress stopped by to refill their cups with what smelled like a fresher pot.

"Even by loose standards, I have about two days to get pregnant," she told him plainly, without the embellishment of emotion. "I was seventeen weeks pregnant in my flashforward with a baby girl. I should already be pregnant."

"And you haven't—" Demetri held up his hands before he even finished the sentence. "Right."

"My countdown is up. That's that. It's not like I can magically transport a seventeen-week-old fetus into my shot-up uterus." Janis winced at her own words and Demetri flinched, even when he tried to cover it up quickly.

"I'm sorry, Janis." He stared at his coffee cup, considering it before dumping in a few more creamers.

"I didn't think I'd get so attached to the idea," she admitted, trying to sound as nonchalant as she could about it, like it wasn't breaking her heart. "Even after—when you all were in Washington—I thought I'd just keep trying, even though I didn't know how. I ran out of options. Then I ran out of time."

She didn't want to think about the irony of it, that she ran out of time to make her flashforward come true while Demetri was waiting to run out of time to stop his, but it was clear it had already occurred to him.

"Al died so he could prove things could change," Demetri mused aloud. "And people still live their lives like the flashforwards are going to happen, like any choice they make will inevitably lead there." He looked a little guilty, but Janis felt the same twinge of guilt.

"We've been living like these things are going to happen, even while we've been doing everything to figure them out; to stop them from happening." She gestured toward him with her coffee. "I guess that means we're as guilty as everyone else."

The shuffle of voices from the far end of the diner alerted them to the time and Demetri looked down at his watch. "Five to midnight. Come on, the last thing I want is to ring in the New Year over old coffee and stained diner tables." He threw a five on the table and tucked his wallet back into his pocket.

Halfway down the street leading toward the parking garage, Demetri looked back up toward the sky and sucked in a slow breath.

"I've heard a lot of theories over the last few months about the blackout. I've heard that Campos guy talk about infinite universes, infinite possibilities, and Schrödinger's cat and maybe in some universe I'm going to die—shit, you know I'm supposed to be murdered on the Ides of March?" He laughed the kind of dark, bitter laugh that had become the norm for him.

"So maybe I die like Julius Caesar in two and a half months in one of those universes and maybe in one of them I live—in some combination, you have your baby and I get to hold her and make fun of the shape of her head, and maybe in one I'll die and you'll name her something Korean in my honor—hey, don't laugh." Demetri looked back down and met her eyes.

"You're going to live, Demetri," she promised, trying not to smile because it wasn't actually funny. None of it was, except maybe the lingering, aching idea of Demetri—_alive_—holding a baby that wasn't going to happen in this universe. "This isn't game theory. It's not like we pick up or down or left or right and see what happens."

"That's how it's always been, though. I live or I die—you have a baby or you don't. We just didn't know the possibilities back then. Now we do." He sucked in a breath and stopped when a dull roar burst from the buildings around them.

"It's midnight," Janis observed quietly, even while fireworks started bursting in the distance. "Happy New Year, Dem."

"Happy New Year."

He didn't speak a few, drawn-out seconds, didn't look away from her, but he shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged awkwardly. "We don't have to give up, Janis. I guess it's not too late to make our own decisions and live like you're going to be pregnant and I'm going to be alive on April twenty-ninth."

"And if we're careless, then neither of us get either," she countered.

"Yeah, but…"   
"But maybe it's a new year and we still get a fresh start, huh?"   
"Something like that."

"You've thought a lot about this." She set the pace, leading their way through the streets as people started spilling out of the buildings, shouting celebratory calls into the night. For the first time since the blackout, Janis felt like things were just the way they would have been without them, with people focusing on a broader future than the one defined by the briefest flash of their futures.

"I've had a lot of time to think about it. I didn't realize until tonight that you might be going through something similar." Demetri shivered and buttoned his coat, side-stepping a smashed beer bottle. "I counted back seventeen weeks," he added, catching her skeptical look. "Then I thought you might want some company instead of wallowing in it alone."

"You…" She stopped and turned to stare at him, her arms crossed over her chest. "You knew."

"Five years now, Janis," he explained, the ghost of a smile flickering across his face. "And you think I don't notice when you shut yourself off from everyone because something's bothering you? Come on. I want to live. I want you to have the baby you want, even it's not seventeen weeks along on April twenty-ninth—did you consider that? I want to hold your baby girl next New Year and make Zoey want one too. Our lives still belong to us, right?"

"Yeah," she murmured, the syllable coming out almost as a surprise to her. They walked slowly, side by side among the chaos of the celebrations around them. She turned over everything in her head, all the ways things had changed and all the ways they'd stayed the same, hurtling toward the same end they'd seen on April 29th. There was no way to know if things had changed, if things would be the same; just that they'd seen some future, for better or worse. Whether they were scrambling to get to it or away from it didn't matter, everyone had been affected by them in some way or another.

"Yeah," she repeated, stronger this time as her footsteps became sure without the accompaniment of a ticking countdown, Demetri's next to her, just the way it was supposed to be.

Just the way it was _going_ to be.


End file.
